19/10/2025
In August 2015, 31-year-old Judy Malinowski was arguing with her ex-boyfriend, Michael Slager, outside a gas station in Gahanna, Ohio. Surveillance footage captured him dousing her with gasoline and setting her on fire. Witnesses said Judy screamed as flames engulfed her body before collapsing near the fuel pumps. By the time first responders arrived, more than 90 percent of her body had been burned.
She spent the next two years in the hospital, undergoing nearly 60 surgeries. She lost both ears, several fingers, and much of her scalp. Despite constant pain and infections, Judy insisted on giving a video-recorded testimony from her hospital bed. Her skin was covered in grafts, her voice barely audible through a breathing tube. In that statement, she described how Slager stood over her as she burned and said she could “smell her own flesh.”
Judy died in June 2017. Her recorded testimony was later used in court to convict Slager of murder, the first time a victim’s deposition had been used posthumously in an Ohio homicide case. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The footage of Judy’s testimony remains one of the most haunting courtroom exhibits ever entered into record.
